Bizarre Indian Anti-Piracy Group Says It Does DoS Attacks On File Sharing Operations

from the oh-really? dept

This one's just a bit strange. TorrentFreak alerts us to the news of an Indian company called AiPlex, which (according to its website) seems to do a bit of medical transcription, a bit of SEO and... just for fun, a bit of anti-piracy work. Apparently AiPlex's CEO explains that one of their anti-piracy methods is to hit non-cooperative sites with a denial of service attack:

"In such cases, we flood the website with requests, which results in database error, causing denial of service as each server has a fixed bandwidth capacity," Kumar reveals. And it doesn't stop there.

"At times, we have to go an extra mile and attack the site and destroy the data to stop the movie from circulating further," he adds.

TorrentFreak also notes that this firm seems a bit confused over how BitTorrent works, in that it lists "Bram Cohen" as a type of BitTorrent client, which I'm sure amuses Bram). Watch out, Bram, or a medical transcription SEO company might try to flood you with requests, resulting in a database error.

Re:

They know how much money is there

This is just a shitty company trying to draw attention from the indian film and music industry so that they can also make a lot of money from both the film studios by charging them for service, downloaders (sending them legal notice to pay them otherwise face the consequences) and also if possible from the p2p websites. They have realised that some so called anti piracy companies in west are making a lot of money and in india there is no such company to exploit the business opportunity so they are trying to be the first one to do so

Re: They know how much money is there

They might be positioning themselves for the eventual outsourcing of the lucrative presettlement business.

It is inevitable that we all will be receiving poorly written letters and emails suggesting a payment in order to avoid a costly court battle. A big problem for the recipients is figuring out which ones are real.

So obviously this works like a charm...

It's funny to me that they don't seem to really understand how a DoS attack works. It has less to do with bandwidth (usually) and more to do with the server's ability to accept new requests (even computers can only do so many things at once).

So they do DoS attacks on, say, the Pirate Bay. Big deal, the movies are being transmitted via bittorrent by (possibly) hundreds of different peers.

All they achieve is stopping the distribution of the .torrent files (if they succeed, which, I doubt) on _that_ site. They don't stop the infringement, so what do they hope to achieve? I guess that just the promise of magically stopping the massive file sharing with some poorly thought out plan is enough to get studios to throw some money at them.

And what they do is legal? Who's the real pirate? All we do is watch a movie or listen to a song. Harmless things. But they react with violence and force. They react with hatred and malice. Who are these guys?

Misinterpretation

My claim with the Editor was pointblank that we go an extramile in identifying the IP addresses & other contact info of such illegal sites & pass such information to the production houses to pursue with the cyber crime police. Further if the govt. provides a permission to cyber police to attack such sites, Aiplex can help the cyber police in providing the technical inputs. That said, one of the common method one can bring down the site is DDOS attack is what was explained. This does not mean that we are doing such illegal activates while we are sending the copyright notices to Infringed sites. We being a seven year old software company & having been understood the cyber law & its consequences, why would we take the risk of doing such unprofessional activity. If some editor has misinterpreted & made a story on that, then i have no comments pls.

Re: Misinterpretation

and what about the other web sites on the same hosting box? Screw everyone else who is on that server right? I think someone should DDOS attack them back, if it's so appropriate a response to those who "don't cooperate" with you.

I repeat, we are not into such illegal activities of DDOS attacks or anything of such sort..... Piracy is a crime & the sites that encourage the growth the piracy should begin to change their ways of thinking & look at converting themselves to a legal site where there is a immense money which attributes to the betterment of their legal stance in their country. I wish a few of them would agree to my statements & start changing to be a nice citizen. Good luck!!!!

Re:

But you don't deny that you use DDOS attacks. Even though DDOS attacks are illegal? Further I would question how you manage to use a DDOS attack. Does your company control a botnet, that you utilize to send down the millions of requests needed to take down a site, or is this simply a DOS attack?